This AI bot just beat some of the best Dota 2 players in the world

The presentation introducing Elon Musk’s startup OpenAI bot came during the International esports tournament (TI7).

Want to play Dota 2 but not sure where to begin? Here’s our list of the best Dota 2 heroes for beginners.

“This bot isn’t like anything you’ve ever played against. We didn’t program it to understand the rules of Dota,” says Greg from OpenAI, the team of researchers and engineers that developed the bot.

“We just let it play lifetimes of 1v1 against itself, and coached it on what we thought was good or bad. And now, we want to see how it stacks up against the best players in the world.”

It’s easy enough to say “hey, we’ve created an AI which can beat the world’s top Dota 2 pros”, though, so in addition to a teaser video showing the AI caning Dota 2 elite players, TI7 also prepared a live match between the bot and pro gamer Danylo “Dendi” Ishutin. You can watch it in full above but TL;DR, Dendi was not victorious.

In fairness, the website admits the bot was built “in collaboration with Valve” so it’s possible they had a little insider knowledge, even if the creators insist the bot has the same actions per minutes (APM) as an average player. But after his defeat, Dendi said the bot “feels a little like [a] human, but a little like something else”, too.

Two new Dota characters will be coming soon to Dota 2 as part of the Duelling Fate update and one of them is a Musketeer cat. A recent TI7 game included a 100+ minute epic where nobody died for half an hour.